Oh yes so transparency isnt a concept at all right, work in the shadows just… because well u can? Hopefully youre just an employee and not an employer with that mindset
17 year old game. 8 hour server resets.
GG blizz
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I just wanna know what they’re doing.
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I don’t work in game development. I have a lot of respect for those who subject themselves to the customer base, while providing platforms of valuable entertainment for us.
In my professional work, I am an open source advocate, and quite transparent. However, our business models are quite different from those of Activision Blizzard’s.
In this case, I am just a gamer who (mostly) enjoys their games.
I just got off the phone with a Blizz insider.
So, originally maintenance was supposed to be 2 hours. However, the replacement hamsters were still stuck on a cargo ship off the coast of California waiting it’s turn to unload.
Blizzard sent a brave group to retrieve said hamsters who apparently we lost at sea when their inflatable merloc floats lost air. A second group was then dispatched and able to retrieve the hamsters.
Just as the new group of rodents got going on the wheel, a nut popped off of the wheel shaft and one deranged hamster consumed it. It was rushed to the nearest veterinarian for emergency surgery and it seems as though it should pull through. This leaves us a hamster short of being able to power the servers.
As of right now, Blizz employees are scouring the local pet shops for suitable fuel, but the domesticated American hamster doesn’t have the stamina of Blizz’s imports from Chile’.
Blizz is looking to rectify the loss of H-power by lightening the materials the wheel is made of and using better lubricants. They will be finished as soon as they can find the correct sized arclight spanner. Stay tuned!
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Dear Blizz - in the future we would like a Windows 98 version of the file copy dialog - you know, the one where it estimates the time to completion and it waffles between 58 seconds and 3 days, 11 hours, 23 minutes - that would be WIZARD
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I work at night. It feels bad to pay subscription on a game that goes offline for 6 hours (so far) daytime for maintenance. Every week.
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good for you. youre one of the few who goes unbothered by it. but you act and been responding for that past few hours as if our position on the matter was not appropriate at all. A big company like them should know communication is the first main key to maintaining customers’ trust and therefore loyalty. The fact that they do not inform us of anything is what shows their big lack of respect and this is what infuriates most of us. we can all survive not playing the game for a few hours, anybody can and should. But to not know whats going on and refusing to give an appropriate ETA time is just wrong.
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It doesn’t need to be a thesis, just “Hey, we ran into issues fixing X bug, we’re working on it, sorry for the delay”
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Do… do you really want them to give you a detailed explanation of the code they’re working with and why they’re having trouble with it?
It would go right over 99% of peoples’ heads. All we need to know is that the servers are still down.
This is why there are always (at least on any publicly facing system and generally true for internal systems as well) at least four separate environments. DEV, TEST, QA, PROD (for publicly consumed systems there is usually a 5th and/or 6th environment UAT and or BKFX. NO CODE (None, nada, zilch, zero, goosegg, le ouff) goes to prod without going through QA first and any code that makes it to UAT or BKFX gets promoted to QA and allowed to run for long enough period that statistical analysis can be performed on the new code and verify every parameter that is different from the existing PROD environment, compare scripts are then generated and those scripts executed under the watchful eye of Sysops, Cyber, DBA, Lead Dev, and any other stakeholder (signoffs from each of these already having been obtained and a backout plan ready to go in case of failure) in attendance or reachable via MS Teams or similar collaborative software. The workplan includes bullet points (more likely rows of a spreadsheet) for every single step and a halt can be called by anyone in the room or on the phone at any time.
At this point deployment has been delayed long enough that an SDE* (Service Disruption Event) has to be at least entertained if not actually issued.
*A Service Disruption Event is any event encountered during any period of time that would impact a mission critical system resulting in a disruption or delay of service, a business system event that if not addressed immediately would cause widespread degradation or outages of customer facing systems or would if in excess of a pre determined window of time, result in the violation of an SLY (Service Level Agreement).
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exactly, even just a simple sorry its taking longer would do the trick for some of us im sure lol. It would with me.
When Blizzard fired employees and others recently quit they have less people that are familiar with how the game works. My guess is they are mildly confused so its taking longer while the new team learns to work together.
Right?
What amazes me is they still need to do “maintenance” at all… well beyond 5 minutes of downtime anyways.
In a world with cloud computing, all of this taking things down to update code is completely unnecessary. They could have had parallel servers running with updated code and “testing” databases. When you go live, detach the testing DB and attach the production DB. Done. All of this can be done with scripts.
If for some reason you have an issue, revert and reschedule. Why on Earth would they keep things offline for 8 hours while they figure out what screwed up? They should be able to revert to the exact state the environment was in, before maintenance started, and then reschedule maintenance for tomorrow or next week.
1 Like
I’m sure they got a reason, maybe fixing bugs or something.
crosses fingers
Hoping for race change!
I can dream.
You should modify this to say “It would go right over Petdetective’s head”. You are making an assumption about the intelligence and acumen of a broad swath of the player base and nothing good ever comes out of assuming others are not smart enough to understand something.
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I mean, you’d almost think that after all this time, they’d have so much data on this that they’d know what works and doesn’t.
It’s a game dude. I realize that most of us probably spend way more time playing it that we’d like to admit, but it is just a game.
Ghostcrawler was very active and engaged a lot with people on the forums. People will have polarizing views on many of the changes to the game that came under his design direction.
One thing is clear though, they aren’t engaging as actively with the forums today as they did way back when.
Would I personally like more insight and engagement? Yes, I think so. Will a lack of it cause me to stop playing? I highly doubt it.
I get that, and while sure I agree, to an extent, isn’t that obvious enough by now, that we can simply infer that by the extended maintenance window?
I can see it now:
“Well you see, we had to grep out the TCP/IP stack, run the binary files through kubernetes, and rebuild and compile the node.js! Unfortunately the nargoles are still causing database locks so we estimate we need 2 more hours to resolve the problem.”
I’m sure that would make things better for us
Leave it to the bootlickers to make inane statements like this. How does it take an hour to just say “We planned to do X, but encountered unexpected problems with Y, and we anticipate it taking X amount of time to fix, but will update you further if we encounter more problems.”
That took me less than 30 seconds to write, not 60 minutes, you absolute donut.
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Sure. Then at least I can ascertain the scope of the issue and plan my day accordingly.
I thought today I would play this game and it would be up at noon (EST). Check at noon, hmm… still down. Oh it got rescheduled until 2pm, ok. Check at 2pm and it’s rescheduled until 4pm, and now it looks like it’s rescheduled to 6pm…
If I would have known it would be down literally all day, I wouldn’t have planned to play it. I would have planned to do something else.